Strategy Beyond “The Click”

August 5, 2011 By Leave a Comment

Written by Augme CMO David Apple

“Incorporating Mobile Advertising effectively to create the perfect Mobile Marketing Plan”

Mobile marketing and mobile advertising are often used interchangeably but they are not the same. Clarifying the definitions and using them appropriately is the difference between delivering impressions or building brand loyalty and increasing per-customer ROI. Mobile marketing is the practice of promoting or selling goods or services via a mobile device.  Mobile advertising should be a tactic of a well-planned mobile marketing strategy. Mobile marketing enables marketers to engage with their consumers and measure that engagement at a granular level that isn’t possible with traditional media.

A demographic is no longer women, ages 18-49. With mobile, it is a woman, age 27 with 2 kids, and household income of 100K+ who buys brand “X” 3 times per week and lives in suburb “Y”. Marketers know this because the consumer is actively engaging with the brand on a regular basis via her mobile device. Marketers are maximizing the conversation with each individual consumer by creating strategies to maximize per-customer ROI.  With marketers able to track engagement at such a detailed level via mobile web-enabled devices, why is mobile ad spending grouped with a traditional ad budget just to be spent? The most effective marketing strategy includes an effective mobile strategy that incorporates mobile advertising. This will become even more important as mobile usage increases in general.

Strategy Beyond the “Click”

The headline in a mobile banner display attempts to provoke a “click”. It is often the end of the line for customer acquisition and engagement strategy.  Instead, if the banner ad delivers the user to a mobile web experience, providing brand-specific content and instant gratification, a lot will happen.

For example, a dental hygiene brand launched a new product last year. Originally the plan pointed mobile banners to a traditional website. Users who click a mobile banner that lands on a non-mobile website are not likely engage, therefore wasting the ad spend.  This showed that there was no strategy beyond the click.

Fortunately, the mobile production plan included a budget to create a mobile website (features included Geo Location Tools, Coupon, Product Info, Social Connect, and Drive-to-Retail incentives) for all web-enabled mobile devices (7,500+ smartphones and feature phones). 8 unique QR codes and 8 unique SMS keywords were created. The codes and keywords were incorporated into all traditional media insertions. The mobile banners pointed to the mobile site instead of a traditional website.

The mobile marketing budget accounted for only.008% of the total campaign budget for the new product launch.  Overall, mobile response directly added over 61,000 new consumer data records to the brand’s database in 35 days, a new record for the brand and the company as a whole.  More importantly, the 61,000 data records indicated through which placement they entered, device type used, gender, age, income level, marital status, parental status, geographic location, web behavior, purchase intent, and “opt-in for more info” responses.

Is this the perfect mobile marketing plan?  Maybe. Mobile advertising played a significant part in the mobile marketing campaign because advertising was a significant component within the overall plan.  The .008% of budgetary commitment to mobile made up over 90% of the detailed learnings of the program.  Traditional media like Out-of-Home (OOH) and Print only quantify circulation and traffic numbers. Traditional digital display returns good granular data, but perhaps users sitting in front of their PCs were not in the mindset of oral hygiene because the click-through rates were very low.

The conclusion is not that mobile replaces traditional media, but rather makes traditional media better.  Mobile marketing, including mobile advertising, deserve their own billing and place on the budget sheet.

Filed Under: Marketing, Mobile Behavior, Mobile Marketing Tagged With: , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , ,

Are you sure you still want an app? Part 2

August 1, 2011 By Leave a Comment

We posted just a couple weeks ago on some of the potential pitfalls of creating a mobile application for your brand or company…but some big companies (namely McDonald’s this week) have still been rolling out new apps. The new McDonald’s app will notify you of locations near you, as well as nutritional information. As we asked in our last post, will consumers really want to open an app just to find a McDonald’s, versus just opening their map application or even browser?

We recently came across another article detailing some of the more technical problems with apps, especially for the Android platform. One of the great things touted about Android is how it’s an open platform. Developers can basically do whatever they want with it and have total freedom in creating specifications.

What this means, however, is that not all phones are capable of running all applications. If you have an older Android phone for instance, you may not have the graphics capabilities to run a fancy new game or music app. If developers want to truly reach all of their consumers who have Android devices, they’ll need to be constantly re-tooling the applications. That means even more time and money. Every new software update (as Android will be releasing sometime in the next few months) means application updates as well.

Is that something you want to be pouring money into? Especially considering the statistics we gave you in the previous post?

Chime in!

 

Filed Under: Android, Augme Mobile, Mobile Behavior, Mobile Operating Systems Tagged With: , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , ,

Using Your Smartphone In Bed

July 26, 2011 By Leave a Comment

As the mobile world continues to grow at astounding rates, the data we can accumulate and study gets more detailed. Because of that, our marketing efforts can be more finely tuned to what our consumers are doing on their devices.

A recent study shows that over 1/3 of smartphone users are active on their devices before they even get out of bed in the morning. And 1/5 of users are active at night before turning the light out. So how can marketers take advantage of these statistics?

One of the biggest advantages is simply timing your campaigns. With mobile campaigns, think about how delighted someone might be to receive a coupon to their local coffee shop right as they wake up? Maybe it’s a bar code with either $1, $2 or $3 off their purchase, so they’re even more intrigued to make that stop.

At night, you could send reminders like “Remember, tomorrow is the last day to take advantage of (insert deal here)”. Timing is truly everything. Do you want to be sending messages to your consumers while they’re busy at work? Potentially not allowed to access their phones? Or do you want to be reaching them when they are most active on their devices?

If you are new business, maybe you can send an interactive map with your locations. Maybe it’s a scavenger hunt that they need to find clues for when they’re running errands at night. With the advancement of mobile technology, we can’t even imagine some of the possibilities at this point.

If this research is true, the implications could fundamentally change your marketing efforts. Maybe your timing has been wrong all along. Not reaching your customers? Maybe it really is simply because your campaigns are getting muddled with everything else they see during the day. The most personal and meaningful engagements online are happening in the evenings and early morning. 8-5 may be when YOU are at work, but it is not when people are paying attention the most to your brilliant marketing.

What do you think? Are you more active on your device in the morning or at night? Or during the day? What can mobile marketing do to better stand out in the crowd? Let us know below!

Filed Under: Mobile Behavior Tagged With: , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , ,

Mobile Mapping and What It Means For Marketing

July 20, 2011 By Leave a Comment

We recently came across an interesting statistic about the number of people accessing maps on their mobile devices. The number is right around 48 million, and growing steadily. In comparison, the number of people accessing maps on personal computers is around 94 million, and steadily declining. The gap is getting smaller and smaller, and this creates huge opportunities for companies to jump into the mobile world and be ahead of the curve.

If you’ve ever used Google Maps, for instance, you know that companies show up as pin-points when you do searches for various categories. When you click on one of these points you can often see a photo, contact information, a website  and even recent reviews. These are all huge opportunities for marketers/advertisers/PR people alike.

Marketers have already begun utilizing many of the native features of the mapping and geo-targeting for “push” notifications based on immediate location. This gives offers and coupons to nearby retailers. Additionally, they are taking mapping from macro to micro, utilizing in-store wifi enhancements to push deals and discount content per aisle, or per time of day. Powerful stuff!

Augme is on the leading edge of location based technology and image recogniton services. This means your brands and retailers are capitalizing on mobile engagement tools, like bar code scanning, and image recognition augmented by location-based and targeted mapping technologies to effectively create tracking and behavioral information of the consumer.

Think about how often you use maps during vacations, or even simply in places you’re not familiar with. These present even greater opportunities for local business to reach out to create new customer customers and drive loyalty. Augme continues to test and deploy best practices and execution plans as new capabilities are presenting themselves by the hour in hopes of remaining pro-active instead of reactive.

There is no end in sight, but the realization of a world of:

  • layered augmented reality (already available),
  • combined with location-based offer awareness (already available),
  • combined with NFC payment systems (already available),
  • available on every device, (not quite yet available),
  • in every part of the country, (not quite yet available)…

is just a short ways a way. The weaknesses are easy to spot and will be fixed quickly.

Being mobile ready is not a tactic it is a necessity.  

 

Filed Under: Augmented Reality, Mobile Behavior, Mobile Couponing Tagged With: , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , ,

PayPal to Unveil NFC Payments

July 18, 2011 By Leave a Comment

PayPal is already the worldwide leader in online commerce. With nearly 100 million active users, and supporting 24 world currencies, it is sure to continue on it’s path towards online commerce world domination. The ease of PayPal make the service a preference of many e-shoppers out there. Simply entering an email address, versus credit card numbers, expiration dates and security codes can take minutes off of every transaction. That makes a big difference to a lot of people – especially when it’s happening on a mobile device that may not have optimal typing capabilities.

The company made big news in the last week by announcing that they would be rolling out NFC capabilities to Android devices this fall. This mean you will be able to merely tap phones together and exchange funds. Although we believe NFC is in a very nascent stage of development, the possibilities of this technology are endless. We’ve known it would come, and now PayPal is soon to become the leader in this industry. Think of the ease of making payments anywhere you go. This could theoretically eliminate our need to carry plastic at all in our wallets.

Watch the video below from PayPal and tell us what you think of this new technology. Are you wary of simply entering an email and transferring funds? Or are you excited about how easy this will make your life?

Filed Under: Mobile Payments Tagged With: , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , ,

Are you sure you still want an app?

July 15, 2011 By Leave a Comment

Many companies these days are excited about creating an application for mobile devices. You even see websites themselves have apps that are simply RSS feeds of new content. Smartphones and tablets are all about these applications, so why wouldn’t your business want to be ahead of curve and create an app? Right?

First, let’s take a look at just a few facts, and then decide what to do.

  • There are more than 400,000 iPhone Apps – that number is even higher when you include the other operating systems out there like Android, Windows, Symbian, etc.
  • 26% of downloaded apps are used only once
  • 60% are used five times or less

Those numbers are a bit sobering. Think about it, why would consumers take the time to download an app for your company when they could just use their built-in Internet browser and get whatever they are looking for that way? Having an application to download and update requires an extra step in the process for the consumer – something that will likely keep them away. You might create some buzz for a little while, but it has virtually no staying power.

There is also the fact that whenever a new device or operating system is introduced, you have to completely rework the app. It is also often the case that when operating systems are updated, your application must be updated. Think about the number of times in the last 4 years a new device has been introduced that needed an application to be created for it. The iPhone, Android devices, BlackBerry, iPads, Android Tablets, Windows 7 Phone…and it will only continue to grow and change as technology changes. The benefits will likely never outweigh the money poured into engineering the product and constantly updating it.

Are you sure you still want an application?

Source: Marketing Leadership Roundtable

Filed Under: Mobile Applications Tagged With: , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , ,

The Future of Mobile Payments

July 13, 2011 By Leave a Comment

On Monday we blogged about mobile payments and how they will change commerce as we know it. Today, we found an  informative graphic that outlines and analyzes a bit more of the data behind it. Take a look and let us know what you think! Do you agree with the projections?

Filed Under: Infographics, Mobile Payments Tagged With: , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , ,
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